Movie Review: ‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ makes a clumsy big-screen debut

It’s been nearly seven years since there was a new “Star Wars” movie released in theaters and there are lots of ways to do it. “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” a disjointed off-ramp that lacks the scale and ambition of its sisters, fails the task. As the Mandalorians might say, this is not the way.

Creator and director Jon Favreau has seen his Disney+ series about a minor “Star Wars” character turned into a huge summer cinematic tentpole and it buckles under the pressure, turning the Mandalorian into a trigger-happy John Wick and failing to do anything meaningful with one of Hollywood’s cutest critters, affectionately called Baby Yoda.

Sigourney Weaver, as a New Republic colonel, early on admonishes the Mandalorian after a bloody mission: “Messy. Very messy.” The same could be said for this overlong and overviolent chapter, which relies on too many computer effects and exposes the limits of puppetry. In IMAX, it’s positively clumsy.

Perhaps the main problem with “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is that the jeopardies are small. The fate of the Resistance isn’t on the line. Planets or whole star systems aren’t being risked. The Jedi aren’t on defense or in ascendancy. It’s just a story about a bounty hunter’s mission on the Outer Rim.

Franchise fans will still delight in familiar things — X-wings, AT-AT Walkers, Stormtroopers, the diminutive mechanics called Anzellans and Jabba the Hutt — well, not him but his relatives. There’s a nice nod to the Death Star trash compactor scene from “A New Hope” and we watch Grogu pick up a cane in a swamp, triggering warm memories of Yoda. But there’s not enough lightsabering and there are way too many cattle prods.

Pedro Pascal returns as the Mandalorian, shorn of any mention of his past, religion or home planet. He basically moves from one battle to the next, a ruthless killing machine dispatching enemies with a blaster and endless martial arts techniques. He’s like an unfunny Iron Man. When he is silenced in the second half, Grogu gets centered and the movie changes tone, getting more quiet and poignant. Maybe they should have ditched the dude and just focused on the child.

This pairing has always been intriguing. Pascal, in his helmet and metal armor, spouts stilted dialogue — “Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way” — striding around like a humanoid robot. His small, green apprentice, on the other hand, loves snacks and employs melt-your-heart coos. Wrinkling up his tiny nose, with his expressive eyes and long ears, he’s the most human character in the Star Wars universe that isn’t human at all.

The plot is basic action movie fare: A dangerous job for a dangerous man. The Mandalorian agrees to find and capture a shadowy ex-Imperial commander, but to do so, he has to make a detour to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son. Yes, that old sluglike crime boss who froze Han Solo in carbonite. Well, he had a son, who has serious daddy issues and is sort of emo, voiced by Jeremy Allen White, He even has abs. Did you have Jeremy Allen White as a hot Hutt on your 2026 bingo card?

What we get are chase scenes through a teeming urban landscape and dogfights in space, a fight-to-the-death gladiator match in a sci-fi Coliseum (“Kill! Kill! Kill!” screams the crowd helpfully), a boatload of horrific creatures — including a truly massive dragon-snakey thing and another that looks lifted from “Stranger Things” — and Martin Scorsese voicing a monkey-like, multiarmed food vendor. (That last one was easy to predict, right?)

The “Star Wars” franchise once led the culture with its imagery, swagger and style. But this movie is a step back, formulaic and aping “Top Gun,” “Blade Runner,” “Transformers” and “Men in Black.” Even Ludwig Göransson’s score is off, marred by cheap-sounding ’80s synthetic chirps along with what sounded like Yiddish folk ditties.

The runtime saps energy and when it’s all done, the scrolling credits for all those special effects goes on a full five minutes. You used to leave a new “Star Wars” movie on a cloud. Here, that galaxy is far, far away.

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“Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” a Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “sci-fi violence and action.” Running time: 132 minutes. Two stars out of four.